Effect of the chain conformation of denatured protein on the formation of single-chain nanoparticles

Protein nanoparticles with sizes ranging tens to hundreds of nanometers have been reported for diverse applications mainly in nanomedicine. The idea now is to push down the size of protein nanoparticles using single-chain technology. By definition, single chain nanoparticles are unimolecular polymer chains folded or collapsed via intra-molecular cross-linking under dilute conditions.Therefore, we have successfully adopted the strategy to cross-link internally the lysine residues of denatured BSA using disuccinimidyl ester cross-linkers and followed the chain collapse using SANS. Now, this proposal aims to use SANS to understand the effect of the polypeptide chain conformation on the structure of SCNPs and, thus, optimize the degree of collapse. This paves the way to the synthesis of biodegradable polypeptide SCNPs for a range of applications.